Thursday, December 10, 2009

Victorian Land IronClad Damage Tracking Sheet

I have been using the Iron Frontier critical hit location charts for my Victorian Science Fiction which I have adopted for use with both WarEngine and The Sword and the Flame. Since I will be running some Victorian Science Fiction this weekend at WarFlorCon and wanted to have something more than just a sheet with a bunch of names of locations on it I designed this template to use for hits. Quite simply each system has the ability to take two hits before being destroyed unless they are repaired before the second hit is acquired on the same system. I have modified the rules from Iron Frontiers to include a Captain, Officer (helmsman or 1st mate) and the Engineer. Basically the rule is you can repair one damaged system per turn but at the roll corresponding to the chart or 1-2 on a d6 if your engineer is killed.

So far I am very pleased with the look and feel of the damage tracking sheet as it is very Victorian Science Fiction/Jules Verney (is that even a word?) and should be easy to record damage with. What do you guys think?

Dave, hits are tracked directly on the paper. You will notice that each section has a pair of squares. Each system can take two consecutive hits before it is destroyed. In both games I allow for a repair roll to be made. The difficulty of the repair roll is based on the type of system but generally ranges from 1-4 on a d6 and 1-2 if the Engineer is killed (as he is not there to help guide and direct repair teams). I say generally because some systems are harder to repair than others. As a for instance optics his are only repaired on 1-2 ever.

Regardless of the system only one repair made by made per turn per repair team. Some Landclads have larger repair teams and some have smaller. The largest repair team is four and the smallest is one. This is true in both rules systems. The most common repair team size is two. A repair team may not ‘work together’ to fix one system. IE you cannot get two rolls to fix one system as there is only so much space available between bulkheads and corridors to accommodate one team. If a team is successful in repairing the damaged system the damage may be erased from the sheet, but if the system is hit again before the damage can be repaired it is rendered destroyed.

As far as rules I have specifically left the rules out of the damage tracking sheets so that I might use them with either system. In the case of WarEngine the rules already give armored vehicles a better chance at withstanding damage so no armor boxes were needed. As a for instance if you are shooting a regular cannon at a Maverick Class LandClad (think League of Extraordinary Gentlemen tank from the first scene) it is a Medium Vehicle and for defensive rolls all medium vehicles treat 1s as 3s. In Warengine you roll x dice and keep y dice and compare them to your opponents rolled x dice and kept y dice with ties going to the defender. Whereas with The Sword and the Flame, a system based on ‘hits’, I assigned armor points to each LandClad to make them tougher. Each Armor box could take two hits before it was destroyed but critical hits were scored by the opponent drawing a “face” card and pilothouse hits were scored by drawing an “ace” card which coincides nicely with the TSATF rules. Ah, but how do we score critical hits on the LandClads in WarEngine if we are not using cards you might ask. Well this is a good question and at first I figured I’d flip cards to see if a critical hit was scored but then I decided that all hits will be internal because the armor is already worked into the defense roll with 1s becoming 3s.

Oh, one more thing. There are four boxes in the pilothouse. This was done on purpose as I figure it takes four hits to knock out the pilothouse because of the reinforced armor at that location and the sheer size of the house but if it is destroyed then the Landclad cannot operate at all and if an officer, the engineer or the captain is killed you just cross them off.